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Full Discussion: Delete all files with specific extension in directory tree
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Delete all files with specific extension in directory tree Post 302815075 by LMHmedchem on Friday 31st of May 2013 01:21:19 AM
Old 05-31-2013
Delete all files with specific extension in directory tree
I'm sure this has been asked many times, but a search didn't turn up a definitive best method for this (if there ever is such a thing).

I have been using rsync to back up my main data directory, but I have accumulated a large number of older backups that I don't need. All of the files I don't need anymore have the extension .back, so I need to troll through all of the folders and sub-folders and delete everything with the .back extension. I thought I would need to do some kind of recursive ls and pipe the results to rm, but I'm not sure what that would look like so I did a search.

Many of the solutions I found use find and look like,
Code:
find . -name *.back -exec file {} \; -exec rm -i {} \;

or
Code:
find /path . -name '*.back' -type f -delete

or
Code:
find /path -iname "*.back" -type f -delete

As usual, there appear to be many ways of doing things and I have no basis on which to make a choice. These files are copies, so I could always rebuild the backup if there was a disaster with the cleaning, but that would take time and I try to avoid putting my foot in it to that extent.

Any suggestions?

LMHmedchem
Last edited by Franklin52; 05-31-2013 at 03:17 AM.. Reason: Please use code tags
 

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LEARN ABOUT NETBSD

suspicious-source

SUSPICIOUS-SOURCE(1)					      General Commands Manual					      SUSPICIOUS-SOURCE(1)

NAME

       suspicious-source - search for files that are not the GPL's "preferred form of modification"

SYNOPSIS

       suspicious-source [options]

DESCRIPTION

       suspicious-source  is  a script that outputs a list of files which are not common source files.	This should be run in the root of a source
       tree to find files which might not be the "preferred form of modification" that the GPL and other licenses require.

       The files inside version control system directories (like .bzr/ or CVS/) are not considered.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
	      Show this help message and exit.

       -v, --verbose
	      Print more information.

       -d directory, --directory=directory
	      Check the files in the specified directory instead of the current directory.

       -m mimetype, --mimetype=mimetype
	      Add mimetype to list of white-listed MIME types.

       -e extension, --extension=extension
	      Add extension to list of white-listed extensions.

AUTHORS

       suspicious-source and this manpage have been written by Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>.

       Both are released under the ISC license.

DEBIAN
								 Debian Utilities					      SUSPICIOUS-SOURCE(1)
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